Independent Journalist & Author

Calling Out the Climate Cranks

This is Mark Hertsgaard writing, the author of HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. Thanks, Leo Hickman, for writing about my book and our effort tomorrow to confront the climate cranks on Capitol Hill. I hope this doesn’t sound churlish–I truly do appreciate your bringing attention to what we’re trying to do–but it’s a bit odd for you to warn me about having my facts straight when your post is filled with inaccuracies, starting with the title of my book (which is HOT, not Generation Hot) and on through what I supposedly wrote in the book about the climate cranks (which actually was written in a piece for the Nation, where I’m the environmental correspondent). But I know you mean well…. Anyway, rest assured that ALL of what I write in HOT has been deeply reported, scientifically and legally vetted and independently fact-checked. My statement about water in California by the time my daughter is grown up is a summary of an entire chapter’s worth of reporting and scientific research, including interviews with the state of California’s top experts on the issue. Finally, I disagree with the well-intention suggestion that I should calibrate what I say according to what might irritate the climate cranks. From long experience (I have covered climate change for 20 years for publications including The Nation, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time, and even written the occasional piece for the Guardian), I have learned that the cranks will attack their opponents no matter the opponents say. Indeed, just as I’m typing this post, my inbox beeped with a slanderous piece of nonsense from Senator Inhofe’s long-time flak. None of this is to say that our science shouldn’t be solid or that we should not choose our words carefully. But shrinking from standing up to these people is not a winning strategy. They are bullies and bullies need confrontations. They have held our nation’s response to climate change hostage for too long already.

5 Responses to “Calling Out the Climate Cranks”

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Mark. I don’t doubt for a moment your long and distinguished pedigree as an environmental journalist. I know full well that you write about these issues with a lot of passion and depth of research. That’s exactly why the remark about how the Californian snowpack will have melted by the time your daughter reached your own age caught my ear. Enough so, in fact, that it led me to look it up because it seemed such a startling thing to hear from you. But all I could find was the CA Dept of Water Resources saying that scientists were predicting 25% of the snowpack to be gone by 2050. That’s alarming enough, which I guess goes some way to support my central point. We hardly need to over-egg the news about what climate science is telling us – it should be more than arresting as it is. (But if your book Hot has this point fully referenced then please forgive me. Without access to the book, all I had to go on was the statement you made in the video.)

shrinking from standing up to these people is not a winning strategy. They are bullies and bullies need confrontations. They have held our nation’s response to climate change hostage for too long already.

I agree, but I guess we disagree on the strategy. I’m with @JRWoodman on this in that we need to be “straight, honest and firm” and not resort to “their” tactic of name-calling and exaggeration (eg “eco-Nazis”, “Climategate” etc) . We shouldn’t need to lower our standards by playing them at their own game. We both know how this works – they get to be wrong 99 times out of 100 on the science and we get to be wrong just once. But guess who wins the war for the public’s hearts and minds? Give them a crumb and, as we both know, they will quickly fashion it into a mountain with the result that your main message is drowned out in the noise they have whipped up. I sincerely hope you do manage to get these people with obvious vested interests defending their anti-science stance on camera, but, as I argue in the article above, I worry they will easily dismiss your valid efforts because you call them “cranks”. Why give them a free hit when your argument is already so compelling?

Mark, Why do you run scared from a debate on these issues? My co-author of Slaying the Sky Dragon:Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory, Dr. Martin Hertzberg has repeatedly tried to get you to respond to his debunk of your criticisms of him. Yet you ignore him. Be a man and face the people you seek to slur and engage in open public debate and stop all this doomsayer hand waving.

I can well imagine who “independently” fact checked this piece of pure propaganda–possibly James the gross exaggerater Hansen, or possibly Michael Mann the climate hack from Penn State, or maybe it was Joe the Egyptian crisis was started by global warming Romm. Once you have Roy Spencer, John Christy, Willie Soon, Joe D’ Aleo, Tim Bell, Patrick Michaels, and S. FRed Singer “fact” check it, then let us know. Until then it remains political science, not science.

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About Mark

Independent journalist Mark Hertsgaard is the author of seven books that have been translated into sixteen languages, including Bravehearts: Whistle Blowing in the Age of Snowden; HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth; and A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles. He has reported from twenty-five countries about politics, culture and the environment for leading outlets, including The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Time, Mother Jones, NPR, the BBC and The Nation, where is the environment correspondent. He lives in San Francisco.